In the imaging industry, there is a growing market for the remanufacture and refurbishing of various types of replaceable imaging components such as toner cartridges, ink cartridges, and the like. Imaging cartridges, once spent, are unusable for their originally intended purpose. Without a refurbishing process, these cartridges would simply be discarded, even though the cartridge itself may still have potential life. As a result, techniques have been developed to remanufacture imaging cartridges. These processes may entail, for example, the disassembly of the various structures of the cartridge, replacing toner or ink, cleaning, adjusting or replacing any worn components and reassembling the cartridge.
Some imaging cartridges may include a chip having a memory device which is used to store data related to the cartridge or an imaging device, such as a printer, for example. The printer reads this data to determine certain printing parameters and communicate information to the user. For example, the memory may store the model number of the cartridge so that the printer may recognize the cartridge as one which is compatible with that particular printer. Additionally, by way of example, the cartridge memory may store the number of pages that can be expected to be printed from the cartridge during a life cycle of the cartridge and other useful data. The printer may also write certain data to the memory device, such as the amount of ink or toner remaining in the cartridge. Other data stored in the cartridge may relate to the usage history of the imaging cartridge.
It is often necessary to provide a replacement chip in order to remanufacture an imaging cartridge. Remanufacturers have developed “dedicated” replacement chips, i.e. chips that mimic an original equipment manufacture's (OEM) chip and are designed to be used for a specific imaging cartridge. Remanufactures have also developed “universal” chips which are chips that may be used with different imaging cartridges of different models. Additionally, remanufactures have developed “multibrand” chips which may be used on imaging cartridges sold by different manufacturers. Remanufacturers have also developed “multiregion” chips which are chips that work in more than one geographic region even though the OEM has regionalized printers.
It is desirable for the remanufacturer to test chips before placing them onto imaging cartridges. This allows the remanufacturer to verify that chip is suitable for the cartridge type. Also, this allows the remanufacturer to verify the maker of the chip and whether the chip contains virgin data or non-virgin data. U.S. Pat. No. 7,971,497 discloses a chip verifier that enables a remanufacturer to verify if the new ink jet chips attached to the remanufactured ink jet cartridges are new ink jet chips, if the new ink jet chips attached to the remanufactured ink jet cartridges were manufactured by a predetermined manufacturer of new ink jet chips, if the new ink jet chips attached to the remanufactured ink jet cartridges are functional, and if the new ink jet chips attached to the remanufacture ink jet cartridges are a predetermined type of new ink jet chip. This patent is incorporated by reference.